Do we know that learning style is influenced by cultural diversity? I imagine that within one culture there is still quite a bit of variations between individuals, and i am not sure if we really have data on how this variation compares with that of multicultural society.

Thing is, we use multiculturalism a lot to explain problems of American society which are much easier explained by the huge level of inequality that supply side economics created in the recent 3 decades. And while we cannot do much about multiculturalism, we sure as hell can do tons about supply side economics and GINI coefficient.

As long as everyone gets a ribbon, diploma or whatever.....we want everyone to feel included and worthy....no one is the winner, no one loses, we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or self-esteem


I blame the hippies

Btw, I agree that $ spent is not an indicator of the end result - nor always (though the correlation is pro ably present). We seem to spend more than everyone else on education and medicine, and get pretty horrible results compared to other developed nations.

Here are the differences between Soviet and American education that I personally experienced. Though I never lived in other European countries, what I know about German education system places it closer to Soviet than to American.

At the school level, grades are awarded starting the first year. It was not really standardized testing, but it was an important metric of how your kid is doing relative to the rest of the class. What constantly pissed me off about US education (public or private, and there is actually more of it in private) is that the teachers kept telling us that they try to get everyone learn"at their own pace", but what if my kid's"own pace" is too slow? Where is the pressure to increase it? The presumption basically is that if you are not very smart upfront, nothing is done to improve it, and you are doomed to stay that for the rest of your life.

Second thing, a lot of US education is spent on soft disciplines (why the fuck is photography an acceptable subject at school???) and not nearly enough is spent on math and science. I went to pretty regular school in SU, my older daughter went to one of the best schools in US (Exeter), and I have to say that end results in physics and math were extremely comparable. My education cost my parents $0, whereas we paid $40k/year for Exeter.

This leads to deficiencies in education in science in particular which are, frankly, horrible. It is constantly evidenced in the country's political process where people have to make decision on such matters as global warming, but neither they, nor media have the slightest level of awareness of how scientific process works, or how it produces result. Which leads to media giving equal time to "both sides", as if they are equivalent. I swear, if a Republican party line was that Sun rotates around the Earth, we would have an equal coverage of this "position", too.

It gets a lot worse in college. In SU colleges very much fewer than in US, and they were a lot more specialized. You could not enter college w/o specifying you major - college programs without major did not exist. Education in college was very specialized to what your job will be, and majority of people whose work did not need college level education never went to college. Here we have 3000 colleges where people blow 50k/year on drama majors and then end up going to become real estate agents. If there is a bigger waste of money than that, I don't know about it.

You're absolutely correct, RayJax. Cultural and linguistic diversity as well as the vast economic chasm in American society is one of the most significant reasons education experts do not believe it will be easy for us to duplicate the results of Japan, South Korea, Finland or Norway. Those societies have very few non-native language speakers and basically homogenous racially/ethnically and in the case of Finland/Norway - they have very little poverty because of the vast welfare state (which I figured Soly would recognize and point out).

With that said, I do have to take issue with the statement you said about salaries. You referenced the Huffington Post article which says:



Notice it is above the "average" of OECD nations (listed here: http://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/) which includes some relatively impoverished countries as well as some very wealthy countries - such as Finland/Norway - where the compensation is likely higher but a direct comparison to a US salary wouldn't tell the whole story because of the big difference in taxes between the two countries but also the government services provided. As an example, a teacher in the US could make $50,000 a year but if they pay $15,000 for quality childcare - they actually make $35,000...meanwhile every woman in Norway gets a year of paid maternity leave and then free childcare from age 1 - age 5. This example could be easily replicated with health care premiums and co-pays. Beyond that, many of the countries with the top rankings in education support their teachers in college/graduate school - so their teaching staff have zero college debt to repay. I've also read about subsidized housing being provided to teachers in the major cities where rent is unaffordable.

Furthermore, that Huffington Post article makes it clear:

I've got more to say about teacher salaries but I have to run. I am also a little concerned about Soly's narrow focus on science though. Why prioritize that discipline over all others? Does our society not need musicians and artists? Or think of it another way - why are K-12 schools even focusing on one field? Does our society not need broadly trained critical thinkers who can vote in a thoughtful and responsible manner? I keep reading Soly's posts about scientific education and government policy...but it's not really about scientific education - it's the ability to assess two different arguments and determine which one is valid. That's a much more flexible and useful skill set. It's also easier to teach than climate science but harder to teach than how to fill in bubbles on this month's standardized exam.

I keep harping on science because this is the discipline that is most sorely lacking in US right now. You may nor see how bad it is if you don't have the background, but imagine the stupidest possible argument that you ever heard about guns from a person who have never held one. Now multiply the stupidity by a factor of 100 and you get TYPICAL Republican position on almost anything scientific.

And no, you cannot assess different arguments if you have no idea about the field. This is exactly what people are trying to do. And they are failing badly.

Ehhhh, I don't care for the partisan perspective you're making. The Democrats had considerable power during the Clinton and Obama administrations yet they spent that time passing "welfare reform" and "healthcare reform," - both of which are largely libertarian ideas at their core. Clinton's other signature domestic policy was the 1994 federal AWB - which is characteristic of a lot of equally dumb views of science held by Democrats. Indeed, many anti-2A ideas such as AWB bans are a form of science - as their proponents often argue guns/gun violence impact public health. Meanwhile the TYPICAL Republican position is "This infringes my rights," although it should be "Show me the data," because the FBI made it clear that the AWB was a huge failure - as are most local/state gun prohibitions.

Back to the singular focus on science - what evidence do you have that it sorely lacking in the US other than the bad behavior of the Republican party (local tech companies hiring folks from other countries is not proof of this, there several experts who point to other reasons for these hiring decisions)? I'd argue that it is evidence that we lack critical thinkers and responsible voters and that's why I disagree with your statement that you cannot assess/evaluate different arguments if you have no idea about the field. Sure, there's an esoteric level of any field where it only makes sense to experts but if we had a citizenry trained to identify and dissect arguments, they could cut through that bullshit in a heartbeat. Hell, they would have the skills (and motivation) to research the subject themselves and make an informed decision - rather than parroting what they were told by a talking head.

And ultimately, most of our nation's bad decisions regarding science, war, education and just about everything else are motivated by money and emotion...not data.

Ben, please... While clearly no party is entirely immune for making idiotic policy proposals, AWB has absolutely nothing to do with science. Public health is not science. For a discipline to be science, it should produce theories that are (a) useful, in the sense that you can predict the outcome of the system based on the starting condition, and (b) falsifiable, in the sense that you can stage an experiment that disproves the theory. Social sciences are not that.

http://1-800-magic.blogspot.com/2008/09 ... ience.html

And even if they were, disagreeing with various social science topics, none of which can be proved anyway, is very, very different than disagreeing with physics...

Back to the topic at hand...

> what evidence do you have that it sorely lacking in the US

Wouldn't the link in the first post on this thread be the evidence?

> there's an esoteric level of any field where it only makes sense to experts but if we had a citizenry trained to identify and dissect arguments, they could cut through that bullshit in a heartbeat. Hell, they would have the skills (and motivation) to research the subject themselves and make an informed decision - rather than parroting what they were told by a talking head.

Actually, not really. By definition, bleeding edge of science/technology is pretty inaccessible to non-experts. This is not a new phenomenon. Consider, for instance, when the curvature of Earth was first estimated by Eratosthenes. How many people back then had mathematical apparatus to research the subject and make an informed decision? Incidentally, how many people can do it now? Common sense logic is that the Earth is flat.

Now consider Copernicus times. Common sense and the Bible both agreed that Earth is at the center of the Universe, and Sun revolves around the Earth. Again, how and based on what a common person with no mathematical apparatus can make an informed decision here?

We are having exactly the same discussion about climate research. We call it "climate research", but this is actually just physics. I am not an expert in this specific field of physics, but after spending my early years studying high energy physics I am pretty damn sure that I cannot make "my own informed opinion" about modern climate models based on the internet research. This is the stuff you study for years, learn from super-smart people, and maybe then you can have an informed opinion.

What I do know though is how the peer review process works in science, and I know what the indications are for when the consensus around the theory is reached and it's now more than a speculation. THIS - what a scientific theory is, what a peer review process is, what the scientific consensus is - these are the things that we should teach at school (ideally, through a required multi-year, multi-subject set of classes in laboratory sciences, like we had in Soviet Union - physics, chemistry, biology, all of them every year for 4 years). Based on the things I am hearing - starting from morons bringing snowballs to prove that global warming is not happening and ending with the discussion of how scientists get more grant money for global warming - it another very clear education that basic scientific education in this country is sorely lacking.

Have to agree there (nothing against realtors)

Just to make sure I understand you...are you saying that the only path to formulating an informed opinion on scientific matters is to become a subject matter expert in said matters?

Hmmmm, we could start a whole other thread on this one but I imagine you and I would be the only people who would post. I'll try to be brief as to prevent further derailment of the thread:



Tisk, tisk, tisk, I think your quantitative/objective truth bias is showing...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health

Fred Hutchinson considers it a science: http://www.fredhutch.org/en/labs/phs.html as do most major Ivy and elite public institutions including the UW: http://sph.washington.edu (notice the word "science" is the very first word in their tag line).

And according to the definition you gave above, a lot of what we commonly refer to as "science" wouldn't be included. I haven't studied physics since high school but as I understand, many of our models/laws of that discipline begin to lose predictive value depending on a variety of factors including speed (the closer to the speed of light), temperature (absolute cold or absolute hot) and mass (I think there are a few others, but again - not my field). On a much more accessible level, the sciences have been struggling with questionable methodology and findings for many years, so this is not all black & white:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

http://chronicle.com/article/Amid-a-Sea ... _medium=en

But as you said, back to the topic at hand...Perhaps we just throw out all of this stuff about the nature of knowledge, "climate research" and even physics and get down to what you said yourself:



I absolutely agree with you and I believe the scientific peer review process needs a prominent place in our K-16 education system (the earlier the better). But we've also go to do a better job of framing the debate when - amongst other things - issues about false findings come up (as I referenced above and the widely circulated "Climategate" debacle). As I've mentioned previously - many individuals in the academy (especially research faculty) are not very good teachers or public speakers. They regularly get eaten alive by a talking head on Fox News and we know they don't produce good sound bites. Regardless of all the work we do with the general public to better grasp the issues of peer review or physics - the message has to be compelling and accessible. Bill Nye "The Science Guy" does a good job of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkR3TI6 ... redirect=1 but given his age and style (he comes off a little too dorky for many people) he's not able to fight this battle on his own (I didn't realize before selecting that clip, Bill actually echoes my argument that you don't really need to know high level physics to understand/agree with the science of climate change).

This is all to say - I just don't think getting the US back on track (however you define that phrase) is as simple/easy as pumping up science education.

This seemed relevant.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2015/03/15/global-warming-hype-is-mocked-by-the-worlds-most-powerful-market-signal/

That article is exactly what Soly (and I) are talking about. The author basically makes the argument that because half the world's population lives near the coast and those coastal cities will be affected the most by rising sea levels - therefore climate researchers are wrong. This is the Forbes magazine/real estate version of pointing to snow in Texas or Arizona and saying the earth isn't getting warmer - it's getting colder.

Again, this is why our schools need train young people how to determine a fallacious argument.

With that said, the author also knocks the claim that one must have "very unique schooling and training" to understand climate change science...again, I disagree with that idea. It's fairly elitist, seems to suggest that science is inaccessible to the general population and basically ensures anyone using the argument will lose the respect/attention of most audiences within a few seconds. America is already pretty anti-intellectual - why continue to feed that?

I think the only path to formulating an informed opinion on anything is to become a SME in the matter. Isn't that the definition of an informed opinion?

If one wants to have an informed opinion on a scientific matter, study that topic.

If one wants to have an informed opinion on a historical matter, study that topic.

If one wants to have an informed opinion on any matter, study that topic.

It is possible to have layman level knowledge and still be capable of being informed on a topic and able to discuss it.

If the goal was to give an example for a moron in the corporate media with a degree in some social pseudoscience confusing the public by spewing out irrelevant sound bites, than yes, this is a relevant example.

WRT REAL attitudes of the markets, you just need to examine the actuarial processes in every modern insurance company to see if markets take this threat seriously.